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A Lost iPhone Shows Apple’s Churlish Side

Journalists are already getting warmed up for the next big Apple event, the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, where they will most likely get a look at the next generation of the iPhone.

But there might be fewer people lined up, and not just because we got a peek inside the new model when photos of a prototype were leaked on a blog two weeks ago. We also got an unflattering peek inside the company itself.

After Gizmodo, a gadget blog owned by Gawker Media, paid $5,000 to obtain a next-generation iPhone that an unfortunate Apple engineer left sitting in a Silicon Valley bar, things started to get ugly out there in gadget land.

Officers from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office kicked in a journalist’s doors and confiscated computers. Apple didn’t do the kicking, but it apparently filed a complaint — not seeking the return of their phone, which they had already retrieved, but information.

According to a report from Wired, at some point people identifying themselves as representatives of Apple visited the home of the man apparently trying to peddle the phone, asking to search the premises. Home visits seem a little more up the alley of the Church of Scientology, another nongovernmental organization preoccupied by secrecy.

Perhaps the law is on the side of Apple and that of the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, California’s high-tech crimes task force, which served the search warrant (Apple is represented on the public agency’s board).

Perhaps Gizmodo was involved in the felony theft of property when it paid $5,000 and published photos and videos of the device.

Perhaps Jason Chen, the Gizmodo blogger who lost four computers and two servers to the police last week, is not protected by the California shield law intended to prevent the authorities from seizing journalists’ reporting materials without a subpoena (that matter is currently under consideration so the police and county attorneys have held off combing through the computers).

But those are a lot of assumptions, and regardless of how the law shakes out, the optics are horrible for Apple. Anybody with a kilobyte of common sense could have told Steve Jobs that the five minutes of pleasure that came from making a criminal complaint against journalists would be followed by much misery.

Apple executives have often behaved as though the ultimate custody and control of information lies with them, and the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect its interests. Yet for all of its spectacular achievements, Apple is exhibiting a remarkable tone-deafness in the issue at hand. As Apple is changing into a media company, as well, its Silicon Valley brand of aggression is running up against its broader ambitions.

For the iPad, Apple is eager to partner with all manner of content providers, but here the decisions seem capricious and punishing. The swimsuit girls of Sports Illustrated? There’s an app for that. But Dirty Fingers, the scantily clad girl that wipes your screen clean? Nope.

A guide to gay New York and a phone directory with caricatures of public figures from a conservative filmmaker did not make the cut. And that app from the media writer and Jobs antagonist Michael Wolff? Not happening.

The cartoonists’ app having a bit of fun with Tiger Woods was not approved, but the one that does a similar thing with the visage of the president of the United States? That’s O.K. And Mark Fiore’s political cartooning app got rejected and then suddenly approved after he won a Pulitzer.

Notice a pattern? I haven’t either. As a consumer and admirer of Apple’s chronic innovation, it makes me queasy.

The iPad, a gorgeous device for displaying content, has become something of a metaphor for the hermetic kingdom of Apple. A seamless device that can’t be opened, it has no apertures for input and is animated mostly by purchases from Apple.

Then again, it will take you anywhere on the Web, unless it involves the use of Adobe’s Flash software, which Mr. Jobs has found wanting. The churlishness about Flash again goes to the issue of control, of wanting to have dominion over all aspects of the customer experience.

More broadly, Apple’s behavior and choices in the Gizmodo affair threaten to interrupt the séance between the company and an adoring press, who have looked past all the frantic secrecy and reverently stared in wonder at what was eventually revealed behind the curtain.

The media’s crush on Apple has always been an unrequited love affair. The company has a few familiars in the press whom it favors, but Apple has “no comment” programmed on a macro key. The company has unsuccessfully sued bloggers who, it believed, had punctured its veil of secrecy, and important tech news organizations like Wired have been shut out as a result of coverage deemed ill-mannered.

The raid on Mr. Chen can only ratchet up the tension.

“When I got home, I noticed the garage door was half-open,” he said in a letter posted on Gizmodo. “And when I tried to open it, officers came out and said they had a warrant to search my house and any vehicles on the property ‘in my control.’ They then made me place my hands behind my head and searched me to make sure I had no weapons or sharp objects on me.”

Apple has an admirable history of innovation and marketplace performance, but this time the company and Mr. Jobs are drawing attention for all the wrong reasons. Everyone knows that it is his show, his call. But in engaging the long arm of the law on behalf of his corporate interests, Mr. Jobs may lead us to think, um, differently about Apple’s growing cultural dominance.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com http://twitter/carr2n

A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2010, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Lost iPhone Shows Apple’s Churlish Side. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe